Shameless

This sermon was preached at our Sunday morning service on 27th July. The Gospel was Luke 11:1-13. I hope you enjoy reading it!

 

This morning, I want to talk about prayer. In our gospel this morning, Jesus’ disciples heard him praying and they wanted in. “Teach us how to pray”, they asked, and Jesus gave them a formula; a very famous formula, but one that seems a bit different from the Lord’s Prayer we pray today. It’s the TL;DR version, if you like (“too long; didn’t read”).

 

<at some point during the above, Miriam, my daughter, interrupts to ask for promised sweets>

 

Oh, I’m sorry Miriam, I did say you could have some sweets during my talk – here you go. You go back and sit down now.  

<passes Miriam a sweet>

 

Absolutely shameless that child!

 

Anyway, Jesus teaches his disciples the Lord’s Prayer (though not completely as we know it). Luke’s version goes like this:

 

“Father, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread.

And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

 

It’s really short for a prayer, especially for Jesus, who, as we know, spent days and nights in prayer. I think, really, it’s a template. The disciples asked how to pray, and Jesus said these are the steps. Jesus’ prayer that he taught his disciples consists of a statement, and then four requests.

First, the statement – God is Father.

Well yes, but also no. Even though Luke uses the Greek word Pater in his Gospel, we know from other Gospel writers that the Aramaic word that Jesus used is Abba. Abba is how Jesus referred to God. And Abba is probably best translated as ‘Daddy’. It’s far less formal than ‘Father’; it’s the language of a small child to a loving parent with all the implicit connotations of love, protection, and care. And I know that not everyone has had that experience of fathers, and when that is the case, this can be a difficult image, but the aim of the words here is to enable us to picture ourselves as close to God, with God caring for us and loving us in that idealised way of a perfect parent or carer.

 

So then, when we have cut away the formality with this seemingly simple statement, Jesus gives us four requests to follow when we pray: A request for God’s kingdom to come, a request for our daily needs to be met, a request to be forgiven, and a request to keep us safe.

 

These are the things we need in our relationship with Abba – his daily presence with us, our physical daily needs to be met, daily forgiveness, and being kept safe – salvation, if you like.

 

And then Jesus pivots.  He stops talking about the formula, he starts talking about attitude. Jesus tells us the story of a man who has unexpected guests, who gets up in the middle of the night to ask his neighbour for some bread. The man hurries out of his house and bangs on his neighbour’s door, and his neighbour tells him to go away, it’s the middle of the night, the door is locked and everyone is asleep. This isn’t the time. It isn’t the place.

And then we get this phrase – “Even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs”

 

And I think that phrase has messed with our attitude to prayer for over two thousand years.

Persistence. Persistence in prayer. Do we pray and pray for something, hoping that one day God might relent, that a ‘no’ will one day become a ‘yes’? Is that how prayer works, slowly wearing down God’s resistance until he finally gives in?

I don’t think so.

 

In doing my homework for this sermon, I found out something really interesting. That word we translate as ‘persistence’ doesn’t mean persistence. This passage in Luke’s Gospel is the only place in any Greek writing that we give it that meaning. The word is anaideia, and it means shamelessness.

 

Frank Gallagher, from the series Shameless

 

Miriam – have you finished your sweet? We had a plan, didn’t we? You knew I had a sweet for you here in the pulpit, but if you were not brave enough to come and interrupt me, you’d have had to wait for it.

The man in the story that Jesus told knew his neighbour had bread. But in order for him to get it when he needed, he had to act, shamelessly. Getting up in the middle of the night. Overcoming the shame of being unprepared to receive visitors. Overcoming the fear of banging on his neighbour’s door and waking him and his whole family up. Overcoming the fear of rejection and being berated.

In our Old Testament reading too, we heard Abraham and his complete lack of shame in petitioning for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. He starts by asking God to save those people if God can find 50 righteous people amongst them. And then he shamelessly negotiates with God, bringing that number down to 45, then 40, then 30, then 20 and finally 10.

Shamelessness got them what they needed. The man in Jesus’ parable got his daily bread (well, in this case, nightly bread). He had the boldness to ask. The shamelessness to get up himself and search. The fearlessness to knock on a door in the middle of the night and risk waking up his neighbour’s whole household. His shamelessness meant that he was able to do something about his situation. Abraham, too, shamelessly asked for what he wanted, and Abba God heard his child’s request.

 

And Miriam, you were brave enough to interrupt me to ask for something. And in the end of our Gospel today, Jesus says that Abba God gives so much more to those who have the shamelessness to ask. And that’s what I’ve got here; not just one sweet, but three whole bags full. Will you come with me at the end of the service and share them with whoever asks?

 

That’s the challenge from our readings this morning. Don’t just pray, pray shamelessly. Ask, seek, and knock, without fear and without shame.

Amen.